eUKhost Review 2024: Could This Web Host Be Underrated?

Fast and Reliable WordPress Hosting

I’ll admit that until I was asked to review eUKhost, I’d never heard of this UK-based hosting company. I was surprised when it turned out to be one of the best hosts I’ve tested recently (and I’ve tested a lot). Of course, it’s not perfect – but I’ve yet to find a web host that is!

To compare the best web hosts, we hosted the same WordPress website on each one and tested performance, customer service, and value for money. Check out the results here.

But if your target audience is based in the UK, eUKhost can give you faster speeds and more UK-based server locations, which can provide better loading speeds for visitors based farther north in the country. For example, eUKhost has servers in Wakefield (West Yorkshire), Maidenhead (Kent), and Nottingham (Midlands).

Managed WordPress hosting is where eUKhost excels, with a specialized WordPress toolkit to deliver faster speeds. It also offers cPanel (shared) hosting, business hosting with a 100% uptime SLA, Windows hosting, VPS hosting, cloud servers, and dedicated hosting. I’ll be focusing on the WordPress plans in this review, since I signed up for the basic WordPress plan and put every aspect of eUKhost’s service to the test.

After trialling it for several months, my conclusion is simple: eUKhost is an impressive and affordable UK web host. However, its plans do have some restrictions, so keep reading to find out if it’s the best choice for you.

Specialised WordPress Optimisation, Backups, and More

If you need WordPress hosting, eUKhost has an abundance of features. Its WordPress plans are not only cheap, but they also include features that many of the bigger hosting companies charge extra for.

These include value-added features such as specially optimised servers, caching tools, automatic security patching, and backup tools. Some hosts only offer security and backups as optional add-ons that can double the price of your hosting – and in my opinion, security should never be considered “optional”.

What’s more, you can host up to 5 websites on the WordPress Starter plan and 20 on the WordPress Standard plan. Free SSL certificates are included for every website you host with eUKhost, and you get a free domain name with annual plans too.

In the not-so-distant past you could get away with having a website without an SSL certificate if you weren’t running an online store, but now most browsers will display some kind of “not secure” warning for websites without an SSL. Not having an SSL certificate can affect SEO (search engine optimization) too, and because the connection isn’t encrypted, your website is more vulnerable.

The only thing I was really disappointed about was the amount of storage that you get with the WordPress plans. Only 5GB of SSD storage is included with the WordPress Starter plan, which can be restrictive if you’re hosting more than one website on your account – and even the WordPress Pro Server (VPS) plan only gives you 50GB.

If you’re hosting a single website on the Starter plan, the 5GB limit isn’t likely to hold you back – but it’s worth noting that some hosting companies, especially international ones, provide unlimited storage (subject to fair usage policies) for lower prices, and in most cases the basic plans offer at least 10GB of SSD storage.

WordPress Toolkit

Probably the biggest selling point with eUKhost’s WordPress plans is the included WordPress Toolkit, which provides you with a range of features designed to improve your experience.

The WordPress Toolkit includes:

• A simple multi-site manager
• 30-second WordPress installation
• Automatic security patching
• Staging (so you can test updates to your website before making them live)
• Clone and sync (to create exact copies of your WordPress website to use with staging)
• Plugin and theme manager
• Maintenance mode tool
• 1-click hardening (to instantly secure your WordPress website in line with best practice guidelines)
• Security advisor to identify and fix security risks
• Debug mode (if you’re a more advanced user or developer)

Together, these tools make your WordPress website more secure and easier to manage from a single interface. It’s a powerful toolkit that is similar to the tools offered by SiteGround – but for a lower price. 

Free Managed Migration

Do you have an existing website hosted elsewhere? If so, you can easily move it over to your eUKhost account. You can use the migration manager tool in your hosting control panel or opt to have your website migrated by eUKhost’s experts. To be honest, I’d opt for the expert migration, as migration tools aren’t 100% reliable. Most expert migrations are completed within 24 hours. You can only migrate a single website for free, however.

Optimized for WordPress

Did you know that WordPress can slow your website down if it’s not hosted on servers optimised for WordPress? All eUKhost’s WordPress plans are automatically allocated to servers that have been configured specifically for WordPress. Server optimisation features include NGINX, a caching engine, the most recent (and stable) version of PHP7, and HTTP/2, all of which work to make your web pages load faster.

Daily Backups

Some of the big names in web hosting (like GoDaddy) will charge you an extra monthly fee for backups. With eUKhost, you get free daily backups of your hosting space, including database snapshots that can easily be restored from your control panel. Backups are kept for seven days, so if you need to restore your website to a specific point within the past week, you can choose which backup version to restore.

Beginner-Friendly – But the Signup Process Could Be Easier

The best hosts make setting up and managing your web hosting account a simple process, and while eUKhost is pretty beginner-friendly, it does have some frustrating quirks. Unlike some hosts, the initial setup process isn’t instant – and setting up billing was an experience in itself!

Choosing a Plan

Deciding on the right plan for your needs is easy with eUKhost since it lists the features of each plan in a simple side-by-side format. The clean and clear layout highlights the most important features, so you can see at a glance what each plan offers.

Creating a New Account

Creating a new account with eUKhost is a fairly easy process. Once you’ve selected a plan, you’ll be guided through the account creation process before reaching the checkout phase. Here, you select your billing frequency and the length of your initial plan.

You can choose to pay by credit/debit card or PayPal, but here is where it can get a little bit confusing. When I checked out, I selected the PayPal option, but surprisingly, wasn’t taken to the PayPal login page.

Instead, I was taken to an order confirmation page, with a message advising that my order would be processed once payment had been confirmed. Only there was no link to complete payment or to log into my PayPal account, which I found odd.

I had to make my way to the client login portal (billing.eukhost.com) and find the Pay Now option in my account dashboard. Later, it occurred to me that the link I was looking for was the VAT invoice number on the confirmation screen, but this certainly wasn’t clear!

I’d never encountered a host that works this way, and it was frustrating to have to go through two separate processes. And then it was several hours before I got confirmation that my account was set up.

After that, everything proceeded quite smoothly – but this strange process might be off-putting if you’re a complete beginner. My advice would be to pay by credit or debit card to avoid the confusion.

Managing Your Account

Some hosts have complicated account dashboards that make finding settings and account details far more complicated than it should be, but eUKhost isn’t one of them. While the signup process left me a bit exhausted, things got much better once the account was ready to use.

The account management dashboard is easy to navigate, and the overview page lists your open support tickets (so you don’t have to log in to a separate support dashboard as with some hosts). There’s even a simple Request Cancellation button if you change your mind and want to take advantage of the 30-day money-back guarantee.

Using cPanel/Plesk

The control panel you get with eUKhost depends on the hosting type that you choose. Until recently, cPanel was the default, but eUKhost now provides the Plesk control panel with WordPress hosting plans. To be honest, both cPanel and Plesk are pretty easy to use (both are owned by the same company anyway!), but if anything, Plesk is easier to navigate.

No matter which one you end up with, you can easily manage your websites, domains, files, and databases easily from within your control panel.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

You can choose to register a new domain with eUKhost, transfer an existing domain, or simply update the nameservers of a domain that you purchased elsewhere (which can be cheaper, if your plan doesn’t include a free domain).

If you register or transfer a domain with eUKhost, then everything will be set up for you, and your hosting space will automatically point to your domain name.

If you’re changing your nameservers yourself then you will need to log in to your domain registrar’s website to update the nameservers. You can find the nameserver details in the welcome email you’ll receive from eUKhost.

Installing WordPress from the Plesk control panel (or, indeed, from cPanel) is really simple. Click the Install WordPress button and you’ll be taken to this screen:

You can change the login details to something easy to remember or have a password and username automatically generated (better for securing your website). You can also choose to enable some of the WordPress Toolkit features such as automatic updates, plugins, and themes.

Although you have to wait for your account to be set up before installing WordPress, once you get to the WordPress installer, the process takes no more than a couple of minutes, and then you can get to the fun part – building your website!

WordPress-Optimised Servers Result in Fast Page Loading Speeds

Arguably one of the most important hallmarks of a great web hosting company is its performance. I’m never satisfied with taking any web host’s performance claims at face value (because let’s face it, no company is going to be honest about bad performance!) and always perform my own extensive tests of page loading speeds and uptime.

I know that you’re itching to find out whether eUKhost’s managed and optimised servers pay off – and I’m pleased to report that its performance is pretty good. It’s not the fastest UK host, but a 1.1-second page loading time is impressive. Its reliability is top-notch too, with a 99.98% uptime average.

Okay, so now I’m going to delve deep into the details of eUKhost’s performance, but if you don’t have time for all the technical stuff, you can skip ahead to find out how eUKhost’s support compares to other UK hosts.

To test performance, I installed WordPress on the WordPress Starter hosting plan and uploaded a customised SimpleShift theme. Some review sites test web hosts using a virtually blank website (like you get when you first install WordPress and use the default theme) – but that’s not going to show you how a real website will perform.

To get more accurate results about how your website will perform on eUKhost, the customised theme I used is complete with text and non-optimised HD images – basically, it’s designed to replicate a standard landing page. Click here for more information about Website Planet’s approach to web hosting performance tests.

Of course, since eUKhost has the WordPress Toolkit and an optimised server environment, the results of the tests I performed reflect the caching features that are automatically enabled and any optimisations that eUKhost’s support team were able to help me with (see the customer support section for more on my experience with the support team).

GTmetrix 

As you can see in the screenshot below, when I tested the page loading speeds with GTmetrix, the results showed very decent performance.

Google recommends a page loading time of under 3 seconds, and the 1.1-second fully loaded time is comfortably within that range, which not only gives your visitors a better experience but can also benefit your search engine ranking.

Out of all the UK hosts I’ve tested, eUKhost is in the mid-range for performance in GTmetrix results, with the fastest host delivering a fully loaded time of less than half a second.

GTmetrix reported a B PageSpeed ranking – and that’s without optimising images. It’s easy to see how spending just a little time using an image-optimisation plugin for WordPress could take this to an A ranking.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

I also tested using the Sucuri Load Time Tester to get an idea of how well the website would perform when accessing it from different worldwide locations. The results are slightly different from those gathered from GTmetrix, but this is to be expected, as each performance test tool has its own testing servers.

As you can see, the best performance isn’t in the UK (surprisingly), but a load time of just over half a second is really impressive! I was also pleasantly surprised by the performance from the Dallas, US, test location.

The “could not test website from this server” message in the Sucuri results isn’t a sign of a badly performing host, thankfully – it’s actually a reassuring sign that eUKhost’s security features are recognising the influx of connections from monitoring services. You don’t need to worry – genuine visitors won’t be affected!

UptimeRobot

Finally, I used UptimeRobot to monitor the website’s uptime over a period of three months and was really impressed by the score of 99.988% (far exceeding the 99.9% uptime guarantee for WordPress hosting plans).

Expert In-House Support Available 24/7

eUKhost provides an excellent 24/7 customer support service that really impressed me. Not only can you contact eUKhost via live chat, phone, and tickets, but there’s almost no wait time at all for live chat – and all the support agents I chatted to had no trouble communicating in English.

Far too often with web hosting, I find that support services get outsourced to mediocre call centres in foreign countries whose agents have a questionable grasp of English. It was a refreshing change to discover that eUKhost has in-house support experts.

I not only used the live chat service but also contacted eUKhost via the support ticket system and received quick and courteous replies each time. It’s easy to submit a ticket from your account dashboard, with the option to select the urgency of your issue (normal, medium, high, or urgent).

I contacted the support team on several occasions to ask for help with installing WordPress, uploading a theme, and optimising my WordPress installation. Each time, the support agents were efficient and helpful. Posing as someone with no web hosting experience, I found that the support agents explained any steps I needed to take in a clear and straightforward manner.

Below are some screenshots of my experience chatting with the support team.

Affordable Hosting Plans for Most Needs

Most of eUKhost’s plans are budget-friendly and fairly average compared to other UK-based hosts. Some international hosts (such as Hostinger) offer cheaper deals on long-term plans, but for month-to-month plans, eUKhost is cheaper.

Obviously, if you have more demanding needs, you can expect to pay more to get the resources you need. The VPS version of its WordPress hosting is three times the price of the WordPress Standard hosting, for example, and there are other hosts that offer this for a much lower price.

eUKhost’s pricing structure varies depending on the type of hosting you’re looking for. With basic shared cPanel hosting plans, for example, you can get a discount of up to 25% if you sign up for at least six months up-front, while WordPress hosting plans are priced the same no matter which billing period you choose. 

A free domain name is included only if you choose to pay for six months, one year, or two years up-front (although the main website says only on annual or biannual plans).

There are a variety of billing periods to choose from: monthly, quarterly, every six months, annually, and biannually, and you can pay using credit/debit card (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, JCB) or PayPal.

There’s no free trial period (there rarely is with web hosting), but there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Cancelling Your eUKhost Plan

Canceling your eUKhost plan is a simple three-step process, and when I personally went through it, I completed it in just a few minutes. It was one of the easiest cancellation processes I experienced among all the UK hosts I tested.

All I had to do was click the Request Cancellation button in my dashboard, select the cancellation reason from a dropdown list, and submit the form. I got a confirmation message, and that was it. Of course, I was past the 30-day money-back guarantee period, but I can’t envision any problems with getting a refund using this process.